Learning Polish

Today I had a most productive class in Polish on YM (both text chat and voice) with Agata from Poland and Babi from Hungary.

Agata is a native speaker, formally educated in the language and living in Poland. Babi is Hungarian, learning Polish (chatting with a native speaker once a week but mostly on her own with a book). Polish is my mother tongue so I speak and I understand it. However, I have learnt it with my parents and have never had any writing or reading classes. so getting to write it is a bit difficult with all the consonant groupings (cz, sz, rz ) which are so different from what we know and the new letters like ę and ą and ż and ł.

Babi has more experience than I do in writing but I managed to express myself. Agata corrected my spelling and I rewrote the sentences. She suggested a site with jokes, but I found it difficult to read as the special letters did not show and sometimes I could not decipher the meaning. Later in the afternoon, after consulting with her brother, Agata also showed me how to change the keyboard so as to be able to display the different letters on the screen and text.

I am very excited about the whole experience and happy to have such a kind and patient teacher. It was a nice experience for us to be learning and teaching each other at the same time. I hope Jenny from New Zealand can join us as well…her time however is so different from ours!

I am planning to make a multi-lingual page for myself in Polish, Portuguese, English and French and embed some audio in these languages as well. I will try to find some pictures to illustrate my different contact with these languages. Homework ahead!